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Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#251

Post by skizm »

Raphmedia wrote: post #247
skizm wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the community didn't accept it, they wouldn't sell the mods. Just mark them all as free. This is opt-in. Also, for the record, Bethesda only gets 45%, Valve get 30%, and the modder gets 25%. > The game company is getting free content, free publicity, free developers. They shouldn't also get the majority of the profit. You have it backwards, the modder is getting free content (the base game), free publicity (Bethes…

Your argument makes a lot of sense for developper that would create their mods for profit and profit only. They would get free publicity for their products. In that sense, yes, the game company is providing them with free ressources. However, from my point of view, most mods are not seen or developed as products to be marketed. Most are work of love, personal projects, team projects. Fans getting together to fix a bu…

You can't charge based on the modder's intent. If a mod was made out of love vs. money grab is irrelevant. If people want to pay for it the question is how much money should the modder get?

You're saying the 25% is a raw deal. Maybe it is, but that's the mass-market deal. If you're mod is awesome, then maybe the publisher is willing to buy it or pay for it. Counter Strike was a mod that Valve bought and made into a standalone game. If it is shitty, well then you get the mass-market deal or nothing. Everything is a negotiation. If you think the company is treating you like shit, then don't do free work for them that they didn't ask for.

Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#252

Post by Raphmedia »

TheHypnotist wrote: post #227
ryan-allen wrote: post #63

Paid mods are fine, they should have led from the back, not the front, somehow. The rates were bad, and the launch mods were just... crap useless crap. The people leading the charge were useless idiots too, they are happy to pay for Skyrim and not for quality mods? There should be opportunity for content creators to contribute in a significant way and get paid to do it. This is just awful execution of a good idea, wi…

Why should modders get the most? Most of the work is already done for them. You want a bigger piece of the pie? License the engine and make your own game.

Yes and no. For a mod that is essentially changing some variables in order to change some of the gameplay, yes.

However, if you create a mod that changes all of the game sounds, using your own recordings, why should most of the profit go to the game company?

If you create a mod that completely overhaul the shader system, why should the game company get the most of the profit?

If you create a mod that makes all of a game's textures HD, using your own textures, why should the game company get most of the profit?

If you create a mod that patches all the remaining glitches and bugs of a no longer supported game, why should the game company get most of the profit?

Those people are already supporting and increasing the games quality. They are pretty much passionate and talented volunteers. Either you don't pay them, or you pay them an honestly. You don't establish a system that allow you to piggy back on their work in order to make profit.

Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#253

Post by Retric »

koube wrote: post #229
Retric wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of other people could post and charge for your mod.

If you also posted the mod for free, nobody would have a reason to pay for a re-posted paid mod. If you're both charging for it, then that goes into the realm of intellectual property. That's a change that could be painful in a world of previously free mods, but something not uncommon in other places. It's an app store. The question comes down to: would you rather have an ecosystem of only free (or donation-driven) m…

You’re assuming perfect information. Amazon sells plenty of ebooks you can get for free on another site.

Honestly, they could have pulled this off. If they made a new game with the option to sell mods and had some sort of review process doing due diligence that would have been something else. Or even some sort of auto check for conflicts. But, this seemed like a horrible money grab where they wanted to extract 75% of the income without doing anything.

Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#254

Post by lightbritefight »

belorn wrote: post #170
talmand wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A donation doesn't instill the same level of responsibility to the product. A donation is to support a hobby, a payment is to support a job.

Then do the Patreon model where the modder is "hired" by the community. The modder/s decide a minimum wage, and then see if the community is willing to continue to support the mod creation. The beautiful aspect of this compared to selling products is that everyone involve know what is expected from each other, the responsibility to fix bugs is established in the beginning, and its very hard to sell someones else mod…

There is a former maxis employee doing exactly that for high quality building mods in cities :skyline. Its working well for him, but that has partly to do with the his former job, the pure quality of his work, and the press attention hes garnered. I suspect it was the timing of maxis closing and Cities releasing that helped the most, although his models are excellent in every way. Its just that even with great art, without some attention you will languish.

It would be a great thing if Valve implemented a Patreon model for modding instead of direct pay. That would let people get the attention their great work deserves, streamline donations, and not change the nature of the modding community in the process.

Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#255

Post by yebyen »

random28345 wrote: post #249
yebyen wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how the idea that Steam should get a share approaching 30% is any less repugnant than that. Visa gets less than 4%, and they are the ones that are really processing the charge. Valve eats that much, and whatever they get paid over that is simply for their role in facilitating the transaction If any of these three parties declined to provide their own involvement, a sale does not happen. So all of them are…

> I don't see how the idea that Steam should get a share approaching 30% is any less repugnant than that. If you don't understand they 30% is reasonable, then you haven't tried to sell a game in the last 5 years. That 30% you're paying increases your sales by a factor of 50x, and game developers are quite happy to take 70% of a much larger pie.

> to take 70%

We were talking about the mod sales. Nobody is taking 70%, unless you counted the original game sale as part of the pie. Maybe we should.

The split as I understood it to be defined was: Valve takes 30% (arguably OK, but I'd argue for less), Game dev gets 45% (passive income hacker, woo!) and the Mod dev gets 25%.

I think it would be perfectly reasonable for Mod devs to get 45% of the sales of their own mods, but Valve asked Bethesda to define the split. What self-respecting PIH is going to give themselves or their own company less than 50%, really, if they are unilaterally the one making the decision about who gets paid and how much?

You are also right about one more thing, I don't have the first idea about selling games. But I would argue it's more work to build EITHER or BOTH a game engine and a mod than it is to sell it. In other words, Bethesda's cut should not be less than Valve's, in my humble opinion, and those mods would NOT have been for sale (or for free) without Bethesda and their game engine.

(Or at least, we would have entirely some other developer and game to thank for their share in this controversy.)

Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#256

Post by Raphmedia »

skizm wrote: post #251
Raphmedia wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument makes a lot of sense for developper that would create their mods for profit and profit only. They would get free publicity for their products. In that sense, yes, the game company is providing them with free ressources. However, from my point of view, most mods are not seen or developed as products to be marketed. Most are work of love, personal projects, team projects. Fans getting together to fix a bu…

You can't charge based on the modder's intent. If a mod was made out of love vs. money grab is irrelevant. If people want to pay for it the question is how much money should the modder get? You're saying the 25% is a raw deal. Maybe it is, but that's the mass-market deal. If you're mod is awesome, then maybe the publisher is willing to buy it or pay for it. Counter Strike was a mod that Valve bought and made into a s…

How would you do it? Be glad the that some of the money is send to the modder when you purchase a mod and have modders abandon games that take too big a cut?

From my point of view, if this happens, it would simply hurt the modding community as a whole. Big games like Skyrim will get a big quantity of low quality mods that sells for lower and lower, driving the market down, making the modder already small cut even smaller.

Damn, this situation is complicated. I understand why Steam pulled the plug while they think about it more.

Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#257

Post by blakeyrat »

jclos wrote: post #17
fallat wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the more important thing is they actually responded to their users. Valve is a model company. Live and learn.

I don't to sound like a pessimist but reading the blog post on Steam I can't help but notice: "We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating." Translation: "We'll let it go this time ". It wouldn't surprise me if the next Bethesda game had that very same system baked-in right from the st…

If Bethesda/Steam know this feature is coming, they can create tools to help make it actually successful.

For example, they can require mod makers to explicitly assign a license to their work before publishing the mod. Even allow encryption/signing of mods. That alone would have vastly reduced the "this jerkwad stole my free mod and is charging for it!" problem.

Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#258

Post by blakeyrat »

TheHypnotist wrote: post #85
gkwelding wrote: post #2

I think Valve/Steam (and Bethesda) really screwed up on this one. Although the idea of modders being fairly compensated for their work is a great idea the execution was poor at best. Only 25% going to the content creators? Really? And a poor returns mechanism, getting a refund gets you banned from the steam store for 7 days to stop abuse. That's a poor returns policy when you're buying things like mods that might be…

Modders should be able to ask for donations, nothing more. They should see this as an opportunity to create great content based off of a much larger and more established game. If they want to get compensated, perhaps their great content will take off and one day they can make their own standalone, but until then, donations only. See Counter-Strike, DayZ, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Insurgency, et al.

Two comments:

1) Valve half-assed the implementation (of course) so that existing mods couldn't be changed to "pay what you want" (a.k.a. donations) unless you deleted and re-uploaded the mod (thus breaking auto-updates for anybody who had the old version).

2) The real tragedy here is that Valve's also turned off the "pay what you want" option in addition to the listed price options. So if I do want to accept donations for my mods, even understanding my "cut" is only 25%, I can no longer do that.

Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#259

Post by blakeyrat »

pearle wrote: post #116
castell wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bethesda introduced DLCs to the PC gaming world in 2006: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_IV:_Oblivion#... The first update came as a set of specialized armor for Oblivion‍ '​s ridable horses; released on April 3, 2006. Although gamers generally displayed enthusiasm for the concept of micropayments for downloadable in-game content, many expressed their dissatisfaction at the price they had to pay for th…

Bioware was doing DLC before it was called DLC and long before Bethesda. Google Neverwinter Nights premium modules.

We used to call them "expansion packs". They were the same thing as DLC, just without the DL. (Nobody had enough bandwidth to do large game asset downloads.)

The concept's old as dirt.

Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#260

Post by UK-AL »

fiblye wrote: post #33
UK-AL wrote: post #23

I just don't think gamers understand, if you pay for high quality mods, your gonna get more high quality mods. It's a bit like the crazy excuses people make for pirating games.

Most of the money wasn't even going to the modders. With AAA companies increasingly putting out broken/unfinished games and modders making unofficial patches, it's ridiculous to be rewarding the publisher with most of the money and not the modder. I think the biggest problem most people had was that they forecasted Steam's mod marketplace as being swamped with garbage mods that offered no real value and were nothing…

Its relatively easy filter out good and crap mods. That's what markets are good at. Good ones will rise to the top and become best sellers, and bad ones will flop.
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